This November 2024 I have two special, to me, artworks on exhibit in a juried exhibition called “Spectrum of Exposure” at BWAC, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY.

These two works reflect my desires that women, children and nature will flourish despite the violence and destruction we are witnessing. I will share my vision for this particular artwork, “Breathe”, which I am featuring in this post.

I have developed this work with layers of photographs of a woman and her baby, branches of an oak tree and the blossoms of this oak tree. The woman with her birthing baby seem to support the branching oak. The blossoms of the oak tree drape around them. I have printed all the negatives using palladium, which I brush onto handmade Japanese gampi paper. Then I painted green and red pearlescent watercolor. The green is for photosynthesis that trees use to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and release oxygen, which we breathe. The red is our blood, the carrier of oxygen in our bodies.

This work of life and breath is my offering to women, children, plants and animals worldwide.

When in the Gulf of Maine the sea ebbs, the seaweed named Irish moss is revealed. Irish moss cushions living things in layers. Rachel Carson describes this as “life exists on other life, or within it, or under it, or above it” in her book “The Edge of the Sea”.

At Arts Gowanus Open Studios, October 19 and 20, noon to 6 PM, 69 Second Ave., Brooklyn, I will display this camera-less, palladium print in collaboration with this poem by poet Diane Mehta.

Vent a dome, invent a habitat

for tubeworm, sea-stout, eelpout

waltzing, 700 degrees in love.

They must know their origin

is hydrothermal swirling,

that fate is motion-of-lfe

agitating to occupy the world.

On exhibit at ChincharMaloney in Taos, NM https://chincharmaloney.com/shop-art/alice-garik

are fifteen of my unique palladium prints. That the black and white palladium prints are in Taos is significant because in Zuni culture the use of black and white in their pottery represents the upper world. The featured print here of her hands crossed in a flight movement with her bird tattoo relates to the world of spirit.

My palladium prints are handmade using the traditional analogue darkroom techniques of making negatives, either camera-less or photographs with a 4X5 large format camera. Brushing palladium on handmade Japanese gampi, I layer my negatives and expose them using the sun. The resulting montage is spontaneous and suggests movement with the images embedded in a paper with the tactility of silk.

A tattooed SERPENT-DRAGON rests on a nest of twigs. The twigs symbolize the microbial ecosystem we live in and that our bodies extend beyond our skin. Another serpent-dragon grows ROOTS like a tree which symbolize our ability to be rooted. Dandelion seeds disperse and fly as if they had wings intersecting another tattooed serpent-dragon to symbolize our ability to CREATE and nurture.

Lunar New Year 2024 will be the year of the Wood Dragon. The dragon is the only mythic animal in the Chinese Zodiac. It is associated with good luck, health, abundance, and strength. The element of wood is one of the five elements that constitute human and ecological health in traditional acupuncture. My own beliefs about our embeddedness in nature are reinforced by these theories and insights. The wood element is easily seen in trees where their rooted trunks expand with their branches. Extending these thoughts to our own health and well being, the Wood Dragon is about our own rootedness and our abilities to expand and grow.

My artwork embraces our embeddedness in the natural world. With my fingers CARRESSING an Iris, like a honeybee seeking nectar, I see its forms. I rotate the Iris this way and that way to create with my enlarger camera-less 16X20 inch negatives. For me the IRIS is a landscape, an ecosystem in constant becoming, a landscape of transcendence.

I print my negatives with palladium, using sunlight to expose the thin, translucent gampi paper. As I look at one of my prints titled IRIS GEOMETRY, I see how the palladium emulsion is absorbed to reveal the depth of the image.

My handmade artworks, about the metamorphosis that tattooing gives people, are exhibited with the work of two other artists at a boutique hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Untitled at 3 Freeman Alley, from November 2023 through February 15, 2024. The exhibit titled “Vital Impetus: Life Signs”, curated by Elizabeth Chatham of AzureArtsNYC is situated in the expansive modern lobby. The hotel aims to provide guests, the “tattoo generation”, with the flavor of New York City with our artworks, murals and even graffiti.

My handmade artistic approach fits with the murals hand painted in the hotel. My works on exhibit are about tattoos. I use film when I photograph people’s tattoos. I enlarge my 4X5 inch film in a wet darkroom and brush palladium on handmade Japanese gampi paper to print my negatives. I use the sun to develop the images.

The handmade Japanese gampi paper, situates the palladium images of tattoos like tattoo ink penetrates skin. Gampi paper is made from a bush found in the mountains and warm areas of Japan. Gampi cannot be cultivated and therefore is rare and the most expensive of the handmade Japanese papers. Its translucency and shiny texture make it ideal for my work incorporating tattoos with fragments of nature. It is the perfect ground for the metamorphosis I seek in my artwork where human tattoos meet fragments of nature. This metamorphosis, I hope, will transform the experience of people sitting in the comfortable lobby as they talk, enjoy coffee and work.

This work “Beyond the Veil” will be on exhibit with a poem, “Veil Not”, by Iranian poet Ala Khaki from August 5- September 4 at The Lakes Gallery in Laconia, New Hampshire. This collage and the accompanying poem support the struggle of Iranian women and girls for equality and freedom from the harsh patriarchal rules imposed by the Iranian leadership. Echoing this is a very moving piece published in The New York Times Magazine titled “Dreaming of a New Iran.”

In this work I use the language of forms to connect physically and spiritually with the burden of enforced wearing of a head covering. The forbidding black forms above which the young girl rises, as she looks beyond as if into the future, hold and appear to subdue a woman below them. I also use the language of color –blue, the color of open skies is intertwined in the girl’s hair and the red lines are for the fires in Ala Khaki’s poem. With these colors I speak of the yearnings for freedom for the women of Iran.

Here is Ala Khaki’s poem:

To compliment “Beyond the Veil”, I will also be exhibiting “Flower Play” and “Trembling”. These works of flowers speak of transformation and states of joy and growth. They echo the desires of Iranian women for freedom.

My artwork in the form of palladium prints is on exhibit. This exhibition has been curated by Azure Arts and the dates are February 23, 2023 to March 13, 2023. The venue is located at 5 Rivington Street in Manhattan. My work is in correspondence with two other artists who address the theme of “Vital Impetus”.

“Vital impetus” derives from the concept of “elan vital” , a term coined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Rather than simply adhering to a set of mechanistic laws, Bergson contended that life has an inherent drive or impulse towards creativity, growth and innovation. While his philosophy emphasizes the role of individual experience, consciousness and creativity, he also saw the ‘self’ as fundamentally connected to others. The ‘self’ for Bergson, stands in dynamic relation to others. The ‘self’ is evolving constantly through its interactions with others.

In my artworks on exhibit, the human body is explored as a site for construction and communication of identity. Tattoos are vehicles for merging our human experiences with the larger world. By culling images from mythology, artifacts, and flora and fauna, my work explores the vital connections between self and other.

At the end of 2022, I received notice that my art works can be part of the celebrated White Columns curated artist registry. This work displayed here is one of the works in the registry. It is part of my work on the ocean where a wave carries and splashes on the extended claws of a horseshoe crab. I plan to add more works to the registry soon. The works on display there can be seen by typing in my name, Alice Garik, on the White Columns website: https://registry.whitecolumns.org

At Arts Gowanus Open Studios, one of the collages I exhibited is about the movement and protest by Iranian women for their rights in what is called: Woman.Life.Freedom. My works used flowers to symbolize the beauty of life and its fragility. Flowers are associated also with the cycle of life from seed to flowering to fruiting to death and then back to regeneration. The woman’s hand weaving through the snakeskin also alludes to the cycles of regeneration. The inspiration for this print is the ancient sculptures of the serpent divinity, usually a woman who holds and is embraced by snakes. The serpent is a symbol of feminine wisdom.

This particular art work is a response to the outcry by women in Iran and now all over the globe. Woman.Life.Freedom resonates with the transformation all women seek for equality, no matter where they live.